The Education Capital

I made it through public school at the top of my class because my guardians taught me from what they had learned. My own children were faced with teachers who brought them down to the level of the class, text books that abandoned grammatical rules and mathematical logic in favour of scattershot, incidental learning. They were surrounded by peers who considered any one good at learning to be a geek. We no longer teach our children the process of memorization, organization and expression, the tools by which the mind learns. The left over remnants of those methods have carried us through several decades of schooling without catastrophe. But sooner or later, the capital gets used up.